Month: September 2017

When is the Best Time to Post Content on Social Media?

When is the Best Time to Post Content on Social Media?

Remember back when publishing content on the internet was unchallenging? Those days are long gone… it’s no longer just about coming up with something to write about and posting it to your site. Now it’s all about the pre-planning process, mapping out your content, knowing when and where to publish it and then ultimately focusing on your content promotion afterward. What was once such an easy task has now become a full-time job in itself.

With so much focus on content creation, we wanted to highlight the importance of knowing when and where to share your content after it goes live. Everyone probably has their own preferred times to write content throughout the day, but if you are writing new articles and publishing to your site at 2am in the morning, you could be missing out big time.

Even more important than when and how you are posting content to your site, is when and how you are posting to social media. Through the multi-section infographic below, let’s take a look at some of the most effective ways to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram for expanding your content reach online. To see the full infographic in its entirety, click here.

Best Times to Post to Facebook

Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world and it also offers sharing options for its users. Whether it’s through a personal profile or on a Fan page, the response and engagement you receive through Facebook will depend heavily on the times and days of the week you post updates.

Here are some tips and tricks to help with your engagement on Facebook.

  • Thursdays and Fridays, either at 1pm for the most shares, or 3pm for the most clicks. As explained, the less people want to be at work, the more they are on Facebook.
  • The best days of the week to share content are Thursdays and Fridays.
  • The best time of the day to send out a status update is around noon.

When focusing on Facebook for content outreach and promotion, don’t forget to share with both your personal and business accounts. All too often we find businesses and brands creating social media Fan Pages, only to let their users go stale by not creating new content for them to see. When you have really high-quality content that you want to reach all of your followers on Facebook, be sure to consider your options with Facebook Ads premium advertising and update boosting.

Best_Times_to_Post_to_Facebook

Best Times to Post to Twitter

Twitter currently has over 300 million active users on their site. While they might not have over a billion users like Facebook, but Twitter is definitely changing the way content and information is found and shared in the world today. Whenever something news breaking happens, it usually happens on Twitter first.

Here are some tips and tricks to help with your engagement on Twitter.

  • With the half-life of a tweet, being only 24 minutes long (4 times shorter than a Facebook post) your window of opportunity is tight.
  • The HuffingtonPost reports for maximum retweets, try to post at 5pm, 12pm, and 6pm. Additionally, 12pm and 6pm have been seen to deliver higher click-through rates. The best days to Tweet for business-to-business organizations is Monday through Friday. For business-to-consumer it’s the weekends and Wednesdays.
  • Hubspot reports posting between the hours of 12pm and 3pm on Mondays through Friday are ideal for engagement. It was also noted that posting on Wednesdays between 5-6pm also delivers higher results.
  • KissMetrics reported that weekdays at 5pm is when the highest percentage of retweets occurs. The best time of the day to tweet is at 5pm, and the best days are mid-week and weekends.

As mentioned earlier, Twitter is one of the most reliable networks for finding out what is happening in the world as it happens. In addition to using Twitter for sending out your own content and updates, be sure to take advantage of trending hashtags to reach new audiences.

Best_Times_to_Post_to_Twitter

Best Times to Post to LinkedIn

LinkedIn in a business social network that was recently purchased by Microsoft. The network has over 500 million users and is mainly focused on business, entrepreneurship, and finance-related content.

Here are some tips and tricks to help with your engagement on LinkedIn.

  • If you want to get engagement on LinkedIn, post in the evening. The best times for engagement are between 7pm and 10pm.
  • Schedule posts to go out later in the evening, between 7pm to 10pm.
  • With engagement rates better in the evening, post your most engaging content there for a much greater reach, keeping less valuable content for daytime users.

Just like Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn also has it’s own advertising platform to take advantage of. However, since LinkedIn is focused purely on business and recruitment, advertising costs are seen at a much higher multiple on a cost per click.

Best_Times_to_Post_to_LinkedIn

Best Times to Post to Pinterest

Pinterest is all about targeting to the interests of your audience and using visuals to get people to click. With over a 100 million active users on their site, Pinterest is a social network that every business and brand should be taking advantage of.

Here are some tips and tricks to help with your engagement on Pinterest.

  • To find success with Pinterest, you must be consistent and spread your pinning out. Varying your timing exposes you to different segments of the Pinterest population and can lead to more exposure, repins and followers.
  • The best day of the week to share content on Pinterest are Saturdays. The best time to send out a social update on Pinterest is from 8pm to 11pm.
  • The see the best results with Pinterest, accounts should be sharing between 5 and 30 pins per day. Different days of the week can perform differently depending on the niche audience you are going after (Mondays are best for good intentions in fitness, while Fridays are better for sharing funny gifs to bring comic relief to the end of a long week).

A common thought about Pinterest is that it’s really only for targeting women. This however simply isn’t the case. Start promoting your content on Pinterest and see how it performs with your audience.

Best_Times_to_Post_to_Pinterest

Best Times to Post to Instagram

Instagram is all about social activity through the use of your mobile device. With over 500 million users on Instagram, it’s the perfect platform for brands of all sizes to engage with their audience through the use of mobile and attention-grabbing photos.

Here are some tips and tricks to help with your engagement on Instagram.

  • To find the most success with Instagram, you must know who your followers are and what they are doing throughout the date. Knowing where they live, how old they are and if they are browsing your content while at work are ideal for creating the perfect Instagram content promotion campaign.
  • HubSpot reports anytime from Monday to Thursday is a great time to post content, as long as it’s not in between 3-4pm.

Logo Design by Brand Experts

Instagram is all about engagement, hashtags and building a following for your brand. Don’t try and force your content to your audience. Listen to what they have to say (and like), then provide them with more of what they are looking for.

Best_Times_to_Post_to_Instagram

Now that you have a complete breakdown of the best types of content and time slots throughout the day to post content to each of social network, now it’s time to get to work. Take advantage of online social sharing tools to automate the scheduling of your content, while also focusing on your manual promotion in the process.

To get the most out of your social media marketing efforts, be sure to include custom branded social images within your profile pages. This means displaying your logo design and custom images on your Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter Backgrounds and anywhere else customized images are allowed. You can see a few examples of how this might look for your brand below.

A pretty comprehensive review on the Amazon Cloud Drive

A pretty comprehensive review on the Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon Drive reviews have generally not been kind. Leading the list of complaints has been the lack of a sync function, the mainstay of cloud storage. However, much has changed, including its name (it used to be Amazon Cloud Drive), and with little fanfare the service has become much better. In fact, it recently made our list of the ten best Dropbox alternatives mostly on account of its excellent value.

Whether Amazon’s cloud storage service deserves a first, second or tenth look from you will largely depend on your needs. There are still some issues with the service, including a lack of productivity tools and no server-side encryption.

If you’re ready to give the service a try, you can sign up for 5GB of free storage plus unlimited photo storage by heading to www.amazon.com. If you’re still deciding, the following Amazon Drive review will help you determine where it stands in comparison to the best cloud storage services.

For complete details, go to https://www.cloudwards.net/review/amazon-cloud-drive/

What Makes a Good Backlink?

What Makes a Good Backlink?
TRAVIS BLIFFEN

To understand what makes a link worth getting, marketers first need to understand the “why” behind Google’s link strength assessment protocol.

While nobody knows the exact formula used to rate inbound links, we do know what Google is trying to accomplish. Understanding the search engine’s motivation is half the battle.

In the early days, Yahoo ruled the Web. Google thought it had a better method of reviewing sites and helping searchers find information more efficiently. As it turns out, Google was right. Finding what you want quickly has become an expectation among Web users and to maintain its impressive market lead, Google must make sure it continues to have the best results.

Over time, a myriad of link building tactics has come and gone. Link pyramids, link wheels, automated link building, Web 2.0 link building, the list goes on (and on).

We have even gotten to a point where some seemingly “above the board” link building tactics just aren’t working like they used to. Take scholarship link building for example. Once a powerful tactic, this method has become a lot less effective. Getting link placements is a little tougher since schools have caught on to the fact their scholarship pages are being pimped out by SEOs, looking to score a quick link. That is not the real problem with this method though but don’t worry, as we get into the three elements that make a great link, I am certain you will see the shortcoming of this once great strategy.

The A.R.T of Link Building

It has been said many times that SEO is as much an art as a science and link building is no exception. Prospecting, contacting, pitching and creating content that other people love as much as you do can be rough. If you are going to go through all the effort to land a link, you want to be sure it is one Google will reward you for. This is where the acronym “A.R.T.” comes into play.
ART-links

Authority

Do follow links are a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. The more authoritative the linking site is, the more their opinion matters to Google.

Think of an authority site as doctor and a lower powered site as your neighbor who took an EMT class 15 years ago in college. Both may have knowledge of the medical field but if you needed a diagnosis, whose opinion are you more likely to trust? If you are like most, the doctor’s (or authority site’s) opinion is going to carry more weight.

What Makes an Authority Site?

Domain authority (DA) is often what comes to mind when someone mentions an “authority” site. DA is a great tool to get an estimate of the strength of a site but that is all it is, an estimate. Even today, you could take a tool like GSA search engine ranker and send enough links to a site to boost the DA into the 50s or 60s.

Instead of relying on a single third-party metric, authority should be determined by asking these questions:

Does the site have a strong backlink profile?
Does the site have a natural and healthy anchor text profile?
How many reputable sites are linking to the site in question?
Does their site feature industry experts, trained professionals or industry speakers?
Is the content on the site consistently well written, indicating a strong editorial process?
Is there a high barrier to entry? Specific writer guidelines?
Does the site have significant organic search traffic?
Is the site mentioned by other industry sites?
Depending on the level of “authority” you need for your project, you can loosen or tighten what is acceptable but this will serve as a solid framework for reviewing a potential site.

Relevance

Gaining links from sites relevant to your own will help you get the most “bang for your buck” when building new links. If a dog trainer was to link to a transmission repair shop in another country, the relevancy would be low. Even so, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen naturally.

What if the dog trainer was visiting family in Italy and the car he borrowed from his relatives to drive while he was there broke and needed repair? He may have a funny story about it, maybe he even found out the mechanic used to be a dog trainer. In either event, there are cases where a link between the two sites could be formed. Whether the link is natural is not the issue here though. Instead, relevance is more focused on determining how credible the link source is on the topic they are linking to.

Let’s go back to the doctor reference from earlier. If a dentist talked about a foot surgery technique on his blog and a podiatrist also talked about the same procedure, which doctor do you think would be a more credible source on the topic?

Since the podiatrist is a more credible source on the topic of foot surgery, a link from his blog could carry more weight even if the dental blog has a higher domain authority, and even if the dental site is more popular.

The reason this update makes sense for Google is because it is a systematic way to kill general private blog network (PBN) sites that cover a variety of unrelated topics. This capability most likely evolved from the original algorithm they created to discount an article filled with unrelated links, a popular early PBN and Sape Network tactic.

For now, you can still see a boost from a relevant article on an unrelated site; it is, however, only a matter of time before that loophole is closed.

Trust

trust-flowTrust Flow (TF), a popular metric created by Majestic looks at the inbound links to a website and assigns the site a TF rating based upon the strength and credibility of those links. Non-subscribers can get a high-level view of this metric like in the example to the right.

Topical Trust Flow (TTF), another Majestic metric uses a similar method to evaluate incoming links. TTF looks at the topics of the sites linking to the site being analyzed. This information is used to determine the most relevant topic(s) for that site. While TTF is a good starting point, it does have flaws just like domain authority.

Above, we mentioned how to determine if a site was a true authority site and what questions you should ask of any site before attempting to place a link on it. We also talked about relevance and how some sites could be a more credible source of information on a topic than others.

Real trust should be determined by evaluating the authority (the actual power) of an inbound link and how credible the site is on a topic. If the site has credible links from relevant niche specific sites, its trust rating should be 10/10. This would be something like the podiatrist linking to the new foot surgery procedure site.

If as in the example above, a site has links from authority sites that are less credible (think about the dentist talking about foot surgery) the trust rating should be slightly lower, maybe 7/10.

The pet trainer linking to the transmission repair shop is the least relevant pairing and as such, a trust rating of 3/10 may be applicable in this case.

A lower trust rating does not mean the link will have no impact, rather that it will be less influential than a more trusted link. This could change in the future though.

Building Links Today that Survive Tomorrow

As Google continues to advance, we can be certain it will continue to invest heavily into protecting search results. Google seemingly does care about giving searchers the best results, even though its motive (like most businesses) is to maintain and grow profitability.

To do so, Google’s algorithms must continue to evolve. The next logical step in this evolution is to give links in content from expert authors and niche specific sites more impact than a link in a generic article, on a general site.

10 Tips to Make Your PDFs SEO Friendly

10 Tips to Make Your PDFs SEO Friendly

10 Tips to Make Your PDFs SEO Friendly

Once upon a time, there was a myth that Google found PDFs impenetrable.

Try as SEOs might, their PDFs could not enter the lucrative realms of Page 1. Google, the story went, simply could not decipher the contents of a non-HTML document.

That myth has since been unceremoniously busted by Google. Back in 2011, the world’s most popular search engine said:

“Google first started indexing PDF files in 2001 and currently has hundreds of millions of PDF files indexed.”

They even come with their own tag in SERPs to alert users that the result is PDF-based:

PDF_SEO

Optimizing PDFs for SEO, however, remains a largely untapped opportunity.

Google can crawl, index, and rank the documents, but simple best practices are often under-utilized or just unknown.

PDF documents often contain a large amount of rich content that Google is able to index, which should really make them perfect fodder for SEO campaigns.

However, optimizing PDFs for search requires SEOs to follow a slightly different set of rules. The framework is broadly the same as a typical SEO approach, but the details differ in some crucial ways.

PDFs are also used to house a specific type of content and, as such, attempts to optimize these documents must bear that in mind.

Follow the 10 tips below and you should have a much better chance of gaining SEO traffic from PDFs.

1. Choose the File Name Carefully

This is usually the first step toward converting a text document to the universally transportable PDF format. It is therefore all too easy to save the file as whatever is automatically suggested, rather than considering the SEO impact this can have on essential factors like the page URL.

File storage

As an SEO, if the document is passed to you when it is already in PDF form, conduct some keyword and competitor analysis before renaming the file using a phrase that is in line with user demand. Be sure to capitalize the first letter of each word and separate words with hyphens.

2. Link to the Document Internally

It can be difficult to include PDFs within the internal linking structure of a website.

Although these documents are typically high-value assets (e.g., surveys or reports), they serve such a specific use that they aren’t called upon as often as a product page, for example.

As a result, all too often they end up as orphaned pages within the site hierarchy.

Sitemap PDFs

That has a direct impact on their SEO potential. If we take a quote from an interview with Google’s John Mueller in 2016, the significance of linking to a PDF hits home:

“If we are not able to index those pages[…] it might just be that we are saying we have enough content indexed from your website already. We are not ready yet to add a significant batch of more content.”

Sending contextual internal links to your PDFs will give Google the signs it needs to recognize that these are pieces of content you want to have indexed and ranked.

Although decreasing in significance as a ranking factor, optimizing the anchor text that points to the document internally should help, too.

3. Link Out to Relevant Content

This applies primarily to content that resides within your website (although it’s fine to link to authoritative third party sites whenever it’s in the user’s best interests).

By linking back to your own web properties from a PDF, you can increase the likelihood that a search engine will view the content as an important part of your site.

Another great benefit that comes with using PDFs is that external sites are more likely to link back to them, due to their value as a permanent resource. If you include links within the document to important pages on your site, you can end up gaining authority (and rankings) for more than just the PDF.

4. Add a Unique, Optimized Title

This is an SEO basic, but it is so often forgotten when it comes to PDFs.

The title for a PDF can be set in the ‘Document Properties’ section. A search engine will use this in the same way that it uses an HTML title tag. Therefore, this will be the clickable text a user sees in search results.

Think carefully about the terms you would like to rank for, however.

The reality is that PDFs are typically best suited to ranking for specific, long-tail queries. By their nature, the documents hone in on one area of investigation – the title and description should reflect that.

Optimizing a PDF for a broad, conversion-focused term is unlikely to be successful.

5. Tailor Content for the Mobile PDF Experience

This advice applies to just about every area of digital marketing these days, so it’s no surprise that it also applies to SEO for PDFs.

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The lengthy nature of a lot of PDFs means that they don’t lend themselves to the bite-sized format that so much mobile content takes.

There are simple, actionable changes you can make to counteract this.

By aligning content to the left side of the page, you will make it much easier to scroll through the content on a mobile device without having to scroll horizontally first.

Mobile SEO PDF

You can also make use of bullet points and bold text to make the content more digestible for itinerant, time-sensitive readers.

Images are great too, but be wary of file size.

6. Compress Images, Where Possible

Load speed is an important ranking factor for any page, but it becomes more challenging to accelerate this with heavy PDF files.

After putting so much work into creating an excellent piece of work, you don’t want to have to remove images or charts just to compress the document.

Tools (such as JPEGmini or Soda PDF) can help compress the more labor-intensive elements like images without losing any noticeable aesthetic quality.

7. Break Content Up With Subheadings

PDFs can contain lots of in-depth information. But people have dwindling attention spans.

By using subheadings, you make your content more legible for readers that may be scanning through the document. This is useful advice across all devices, although it’s vital on mobile.

As a rule of thumb, try not to have more than 3-4 sentences per paragraph.

Between blocks of text, signpost the narrative by interjecting with a subheading that describes the upcoming section and, if relevant, uses one of your target search queries.

8. Use Plain Text

One of the reasons that those myths persisted for so long about Google and its PDF problem was that so many PDFs are image-based.

To our eyes, they contain text. But to a search engine, they see images with words on them.

That still isn’t sufficient to suggest that Google can’t index the documents, but we should give them some help where we can.

Search engines are getting much better at reading the contents of images, but text is still preferable.

Text

Many common tools, including Adobe’s own Creative Suite, will allow you to make this conversion easily.

There is a really rudimentary way to test this, too. If you can copy and paste the text from the PDF, it is in text rather than image format.

9. Take Advantage of Alternative Text

This is another bedrock of the SEO basics category. However, it is not universally known that you can set the alternative text element on your images within a PDF.

The exact way of doing this will differ depending on the software you use to create and then host the PDF, but you can find a full guide here.

Think of this as another opportunity to provide Google with vital signals about the contents of the document, and also a means of ranking via image search.

PDFs are not always the most suitable result for a search query, but images are much more likely to satisfy the user’s request.

10. Track Performance

The objectives, from an SEO perspective, of adding a PDF to a website will be rather different to the addition of a product page, for example. That means that the measurement of its success will require a different mindset, too.

You can consider the download of a PDF from an organic search visitor to be a micro-conversion. This can be added to your analytics package as a goal, so you can see how many people entered the site via organic search and downloaded the document.

You can get much more granular with this, to assess the path the user took within the site to land on the PDF, or which other marketing channels they interacted with before making this micro-conversion.

Image Credits:

Screenshot by Clark Boyd, August 2017
In-article image 1: Pixabay 
In-article image 2: Pixabay
In-article image 3: Unsplash
In-article image 4: Pixabay 

How to Wipe a Computer Clean of Personal Data

How to Wipe a Computer Clean of Personal Data

Before selling, donating, or recycling your outdated laptop, protect your privacy with this important step

By Tercius Bufete

Many families have welcomed new PCs into their homes, thanks to back-to-school and Labor Day sales, leaving older computers to be donated, recycled, or sold. That makes this a good time to learn how to perform a factory reset.

What is a factory reset? That’s when you wipe your computer’s hard drive and reinstall its operating system. Doing this reverts your computer to its pristine state, deleting all your personal information, applications, and files in the process.

Getting rid of a computer without performing a reset could put your data in the wrong hands—and you and your family at risk for identity theft.

Can’t I just delete the files? Matt Ham, owner of repair service company Computer Repair Doctor, explains that manually purging files isn’t enough.

“You’re likely to forget things like passwords saved in browsers and personal data in the deleted items folder. Or you can miss deleting some important files altogether,” he says. “Reinstalling your system before sale is a much safer alternative.”

Google, Apple, and Microsoft have made doing a reset simple for computers running their operating systems. Once all your data has been transferred to your new machine and you’re sure it’s working properly, follow the steps listed below for your particular operating system.

For most situations, wiping a computer with a reset will be sufficient to safeguard personal data. So if you’re handing off your old computer to a friend or sibling, or donating it to a well-known charitable organization, the steps listed below should suffice.

But, to be clear, this won’t deter a truly determined hacker who is intent on retrieving your files.

To be completely safe, you can remove the hard drive from your PC or Mac before you let the computer out of your hands. Do that if you’re selling it on eBay or know that you have highly sensitive material on the hard drive. (The gold standard in hard-drive security consists of using a pointy nail and a few swift swings of a hammer. Just make sure you’re wearing safety glasses.)

Here’s how to do a factory reset with the most popular computer operating systems.

Apple Users

Before wiping your computer, make sure to back up important files to an external drive or the cloud and disable iCloud features, such as Find My Mac, Messages, and Apple Music.

You should also copy your keychains to a flash drive. Transferring these collections of account names and passwords onto your new machine will save you the hassle of re-entering the WiFi password at the local coffee shop or the login info for online retailers.

Begin your factory reset by restarting your computer. During startup, hold down the Shift + Option + Command + R keys until the Apple logo appears. This will reinstall the operating system that came with your Mac. (Alternatively, you can hold Command + R to reinstall the latest MacOS installed on your Mac or Option + Command + R to upgrade to the latest version of the OS compatible with your computer.)

Once you’ve done that, the Utilities window will pop up in the middle of your screen. Open the Disk Utility and erase your built-in hard disk. Make sure to select the disk, not the volume name listed beneath it. Then select MacOS Extended (Journaled) format and quit Disk Utility when the process ends.

To finish the reset, navigate back to the Utilities window and choose Reinstall MacOS (or OSX) to reinstall the original operating system.

After the reinstall, the Mac will begin the setup process. This should look familiar if you’ve set up this computer before. If you’re selling your computer, you can skip setup by pressing Command + Q and let the new owner complete that process.

Chromebook Users

Chromebook users have the easiest time wiping their laptops. Unlike Apple and Windows users, most of their files are already stored online, in Google Drive. So there’s little to back up before you begin the process.

To start a factory reset, click on your account photo. Open the Settings menu and scroll down to the Advanced section. From there, find the Powerwash section and click on the icon. This will prompt a restart, which will flush away all your personal information.

If you’re ready to sell or donate the computer, don’t log back in—the next person who logs in becomes the Chromebook’s primary user.

Windows Users

It’s important to back up all of the files on a Windows computer to an external drive or the cloud before beginning a factory reset.

Also, find and save the serial numbers for Office Suite and other software using ProduKey or a similar app. You’ll need them to reinstall the applications on your new machine.

The process for resetting your PC differs slightly for each version of the operating system. For Windows 10, go to the Start Menu and click on Settings. Then navigate to Update & Security, and find the Recovery menu. Next, select Reset this PC and choose Get Started. Follow the instructions to revert your computer back to when it was first unboxed.

You’ll be asked to choose whether you want to erase data “quickly” or “thoroughly.” Opt to erase data thoroughly. It’ll take a little longer, but it makes it more likely that your data is deleted permanently. While there’s no absolute guarantee the data can’t be retrieved after a reset, this simple step increases your security.

Should You Use a Website Builder or Hire a Web Designer?

Blog / Web Hosting Tips

Should You Use a Website Builder or Hire a Web Designer?

Monday, August 21, 2017 by

Website Builders vs Web Design

Website Builders vs Web Design Services

When the time comes to build out your website you have a lot of options to choose from. One of those choices is deciding between a website builder and hiring a web designer to build your site for you.

The trick is to know when you should build your site yourself and when to hire out the work. Which route you decide to pursue will depend upon your overall budget, what kind of site you’re trying to build, and how quickly you want to have your site online.

Below we look at the differences between the two and when you should consider using one over the other.

 

Benefits of a DIY Website Builder

DIY website builders can help beginners build out nice-looking websites in the shortest amount of time possible. For people who need to build small websites and launch in a day or less, they can be a great choice. Below we look at a few benefits of using a DIY website builder for your next project.

HostGator Website Builder

1. Very User-Friendly

DIY website builders make it incredibly easy to build out your site. They’re built with beginners in mind, so the learning curve is virtually zero. All you have to do is select your theme, rearrange it to your liking, and add your content.

 

2. Drag and Drop Building

Most DIY website builders have a drag and drop interface. This allows you to rearrange the visual elements of your site without any existing programming skills. Just choose the features you want to add, drag them to your desired location, and you’re all set. Building out a website can’t get any easier.

3. Built-In Tech Support

Website builders know who their customers are: total beginners. For that reason, they typically have very helpful support staff that can help you with any issues that might arise. Their dedicated support staff and educational resources will help you avoid any roadblocks that could prevent you from getting your site online quickly and easily.

 

Although using a website builder seems like the perfect solution, it isn’t always the best route to take. Below we look at a few reasons to consider hiring a web designer instead of building out your own site.

 

When to Hire a Web Designer

Hiring a web designer to build out your site isn’t for everyone. If you don’t have a large budget set aside for your website, then you’ll probably want to spend time building it yourself. Choosing to hire a low-budget designer will only leave you with a site that doesn’t meet your end goals.

That being said, hiring a web designer can be a great choice for a variety of circumstances.

For example, a web designer will spend time understanding your business and build you a website that’s perfectly custom-tailored to your needs. It will be more pricey right out of the gate, but if you want a website that stands out from the crowd and has a series of custom features, then there’s no way around it.

Or, if you’re planning on using your website to build out a huge platform, then you’ll probably require a custom platform to do just that. You’ll have a hard time building out a massive site just by using a DIY website builder.

 

Which One Should I Choose?

If all you require is a simple website and you want to have a site online in a few hours, then using a DIY website builder is a great choice.

But, if you have the budget and are looking for a custom site that helps your business stand out from the sea of competition, then hiring a web designer can be a great route to take.

If you’re unsure about which route to take it can be helpful to try out a website builder first to see if the site your building will work for your goals. Plus, even this basic experience can help you get a better idea of what you want to build and can help with hiring a web designer if you choose to take that approach.

Overall, there is no wrong choice, but instead, it’s a decision that needs to be based on your own existing needs. Have a small budget and only require a simple site? Then go with a DIY builder. But, if you want a totally custom site and have the budget for it, then hire a web designer.

Build A Website: Your 1-Week Plan

Build A Website: Your 1-Week Plan

Monday, August 14, 2017 by

Create Your New Website In Just One Week!

If you know you want a website, but have been procrastinating putting one together because you’re worried about how much work it will be, maybe the trick is to hold yourself to a hard deadline to get it done.

Now that we’re in back-to-school season, take inspiration from the students facing homework with clear due dates each day and give yourself a homework assignment: to build your website in one week.

If you have a plan going into the process and break down the main work you have to do into a number of manageable steps, you’ll have an easier time getting it done. And if part of what’s holding you back is the worry that it won’t be 100% perfect – remember that sometimes perfect is the enemy of good. Start by getting your website done and up, and then you can work on making it better over time.

To help you squash all excuses and get started, here’s a step-by-step plan to get your website up in a week.

Day 1: Create your website plan.

Before you get to work creating your website, start by asking yourself all the big questions about what you want it to be. Thinking through what you want to get out of your website will help you develop a clear plan for what the website itself should be.

A few questions to ask at this phase include:

  •      What’s the goal of your website?
  •      What actions do you want visitors to take when they come to your website?
  •      Should the website include a blog?
  •      Will you be selling items through your website?
  •      Who do you want to reach with your website?

Considering what you want your website to do and how to make that happen will help you clarify how to approach each of the steps to come.

 

Day 2: Perform audience and competitive research.

Your website’s not for you. One of the most important things you need to do when building a new website is take time to understand who your target audience is and what they want. On day one, you asked yourself who you wanted reach with your website. Now, you want to dive in and learn as much about the people you want coming to your website as possible.

There are a number of free or cheap tools that can help you find out more information about your audience. And one of your not-so-secret weapons here is spending time perusing what your competitors are doing. See what their websites look like, the copy they’re using, and the topics they’re covering. As a head start for your own website, you can learn from what seems to be working for them.

 

Day 3: Outline your site architecture.

All the research and planning you did in days one and two should help make this step relatively easy.

Day three is when you work out the specific pages you want to include on your website and how to organize them. If your website will be on the smaller side – just a few main pages – then you may be fine with one main menu that includes all your pages.

If your website will be a bit more involved than that and include a lot of pages, then you’ll want to figure out categories to slot them into to make your main menu less complicated and the site more intuitive for users.  Work up a sitemap to make sure you know where every page on your website will go, how it will be connected to others, and that it will be easy for people to find when they’re looking for it.

 

Day 4: Choose your domain name and hosting plan.

All websites live in a specific spot on the web; this step is where you choose yours. Brainstorm possible URLs for your website and do some research into available domain names.

Most web hosting plans will include domain registration with them, so once you’ve settled on a domain name that you know is available, start looking at web hosting plans to find one that’s a good fit for your needs. You can sign up for hosting and register for your domain name in one fell swoop so it’s all ready for you once your website’s done.

Day 5: Design your website.

At this point, you may be wondering how on earth you’re supposed to design a website if you have no experience in web design. Website builders like the one included with many of HostGator’s hosting plans make this part surprisingly easy.

Browse the available templates until you find something that feels right based on all the research and planning you’ve done so far, and start molding it to look just how you want it to. Build out the menus and pages you developed in your site architecture on day three. Spend some time looking for and creating relevant images here as well to populate the different pages of your website.

Website builder templates

Day 6: Write your copy.

Now you need to fill all those pages you created in. If you’re not a professional copywriter, this may be a step you’ll want to revisit later, but in the interest of getting the site up in seven days without excuses, you’ll want to develop some starter copy for now.

Make use of the audience and competitor research you did on day 2 to give you ideas and make sure you’re writing copy relevant to the people you want to reach at this stage. Read up a little on online copywriting best practices to give you some more guidance. And provide the necessary information on each page of the website you’re building.

 

Day 7: Review everything and launch.

Now you have everything in place to launch your website. Before you actually make it live, spend some time on it. See if you find the navigation intuitive and proofread all the pages you wrote to look for errors or clunky sentences.

Once you feel ready, publish it to the web.

That website you’ve been putting off is finally done and out in the world. Not so hard, was it?

 

What’s Next?

Your website won’t be perfect on day one (or day seven, rather), but now that you’ve completed it, you can start the comparatively easy job of tweaking it over time to make it better.

Pay attention to your analytics to see how people react to it and consider hiring a professional copywriter, designer, or UX consultant to help your website go further. But first, pat yourself on the back for completing your homework and getting your website up and running. Congratulations!

How to tell whether a site is adaptive or responsive

How to tell whether a site is adaptive or responsive
Sometimes, it can be tricky to determine which mobile configuration a site is using. Thankfully, columnist Bryson Meunier shares several methods for discerning responsive and adaptive sites.
Bryson Meunier on July 27, 2017 at 12:55 pm

As most SEOs are aware by now, there are three main techniques for serving mobile website content: responsive design, adaptive design (also called dynamic serving), and separate mobile URLs.

While it’s easy to identify separate mobile URLs just by looking at your browser’s address bar, telling responsive and adaptive sites apart can take a little more digging around.

In my mobile workshops with Shari Thurow at SMX West and SMX Advanced earlier this year, many of the participants were confused as to how to tell responsive and adaptive mobile configurations apart. So, I went through the exercise that I’m going to describe today. Hopefully, it will help some of you make the distinction.

If you’re not sure if the site you’re looking at is responsive or adaptive, ask yourself these questions:

Does it change shape when you resize your browser from a desktop computer?
Responsive sites are meant to change layout based on browser window size (regardless of device), while adaptive sites detect when you are on a mobile device and present different HTML accordingly. Thus, if you know that a site doesn’t use separate URLs for their mobile configuration, you can often tell responsive and adaptive apart by visiting the site on desktop and seeing what happens when you resize your browser window.

Want to test this out? Take the following steps:

Open WebMD.com or m-w.com in the browser of your choice (the videos below use Chrome). Ensure that your browser window is not full screen — in other words, you should be able to see the desktop behind it.
Position your cursor along the right edge of the browser window, and resize the window down to the size of a mobile phone display.

As you can see, the layout changes based on your browser window size, even on a desktop. That means these sites are responsive.
For contrast, if you do the same thing with Amazon.com on a desktop, which is adaptive, the content on the right side of the screen is simply hidden rather than resized or moved elsewhere.

Can you find the word “responsive” or “@media” in the home page source code?
Responsive sites have specific elements within their HTML source code that adaptive sites do not. To check for these elements, take the following steps:

Open WebMD.com in Chrome, on mobile or desktop.
If on a desktop, you can press CTRL+U (Windows) or Option+⌘+U (Mac) to view the page’s source code. For mobile users, you can go to the address bar and add view-source: before the root domain (e.g., view-source:www.webmd.com) and hit enter to open source code.
Search the page for the word “responsive,” which exists on the page to call out responsive templates and stylesheets. Click on the responsive stylesheet, which should be a clickable link.

On the CSS page, search for “@media” — the presence of these indicates that are CSS Media Queries, which power responsive sites.

Does the site display different content or a different layout on a mobile device (or when you use a mobile user-agent like Googlebot smartphone)?
Adaptive sites generate different HTML for a page based on the user’s device, regardless of screen size. That means that if you are looking at an adaptive site on a mobile device — even one with a large screen — you’ll still be served specific mobile content.

We can check for adaptive mobile pages via desktop browser. This is achieved by using a browser extension that allows you to view a site as though you are using a mobile device.

Here’s how to test an adaptive page with a user-agent switcher extension on Chrome:

Open Chrome on desktop, then download and install a user-agent switcher extension. I recommend User-Agent Switcher for Google Chrome.
Once the extension has been installed, navigate to www.amazon.com.
Click the icon for the extension in the upper right-hand corner, then use the drop-down menu to change the user-agent to a popular mobile user-agent, such as Chrome on Android Mobile.

Notice the navigation has changed once you switched the user-agent, and the header image decreased in size. When you resize the browser window — even when you make it very large — it doesn’t change in a fluid way but creates more white space around the same image. This is an adaptive site that changes its layout based on user-agent.
Keep in mind that many sites store cookies to remember your device type, so it is a best practice when using user agents to clear your browser history after switching user agents.
Additional questions
Here are a few related questions I’ve gotten on the subject that may also be of interest:

Can you use Chrome Developer Tools to tell adaptive from responsive sites?

Yes, but be sure to clear your browsing history before toggling device type from Desktop to Mobile and vice-versa. Then, follow this procedure:

Open amazon.com in Chrome on a desktop.
Open Chrome Developer Tools by clicking on the three vertical dots in the upper top right corner of the browser, then scrolling down to More Tools > Developer Tools.
Once in Developer Tools, click on the three vertical dots just below the ones you clicked in Step 2, and select Add device type.

Set the Device to “Responsive” and the Device Type to “Desktop.” This allows you to resize the browser within by pulling the slider to the right, mimicking exercise one above. You can also change the device type from desktop to mobile, which allows you to mimic exercise three above without installing a separate user-agent switcher. As above, if the layout looks different on desktop and mobile user agents, it’s adaptive, and if the site resizes to fit the screen when you pull the corner of the window, it’s also responsive.
Can a site be adaptive and responsive at the same time?

Yes. Sometimes this is called RESS or REsponsive with Server Side Elements. In these cases, the layout is fluid, but server side elements may be used to serve smart banners for app downloads or change the text on the page.

Zillow.com is currently like this. If you use a desktop agent to access the site you can resize the browser and the site is responsive, just like merriam-webster.com. But if you access the site from a smartphone user agent detection is used to provide additional device-specific elements like smart banners to encourage app downloads.

Likewise, at Vivid Seats our desktop site doesn’t resize, but if you access the adaptive site from a mobile user agent it does. So, our adaptive site is also responsive.

You can also have adaptive and responsive pages on the same site. At Vivid Seats, we use responsive pages for event pages, as search behavior doesn’t vary much across devices, but adaptive for certain category pages where we noticed a difference in search behavior that we want to address on the page.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.